Les recompositions du Norte Grande chilien pendant la transition démocratique : enjeux d'une gestion territoriale en contexte néolibéral

Abstract

The reorganisation of the Chilean Norte Grande during the democratic transition : the stakes involved in territorial management in a neoliberal context. In the elongated and politically centralised country of Chile, the debate on the virtues of planning has been going on for some fifty years. Paradoxically, it was under the dictatorship (1973-1990) that profound changes in the administrative organisation were made, including the creation of a new reference scale for planning, the Region. Planning at this scale should allow a closer control of the territory as well as diffusion, at the local scale, of the neoliberal economic principles promoted by the military government. In the Norte Grande, internationalisation of the economy took the form of an increase in foreign investment in the mining sector. In the 1990s, it lead to the opening up of new private mines which were much bigger than earlier mines. Since 1990, the democratic transition governments have tried to manage this economic and administrative heritage with a view to promoting both the regional spinoffs of growth and a type of development involving greater local participation. However, the context in which the Regions were created makes their adaptation to a democracy quite difficult : the identification of the actors likely to take part in the democratic process and of the scale at which their claims are expressed are illustrative of the stakes involved in territorial politics in a neoliberal environment.